Would you rather healers get more complex healing kits or more complex DPS kits?

1. Do not touch Tanks' self healing. Let tanks be self-sufficient to some degree. It does not feel good having to rely on your healer for the vast majority of your survivability as a tank. Dieing a death of a thousand paper cuts as your health is chipped away and you have no way to recover. Meanwhile your friendly glare mage is busy giving a dragon nasty looks as you lay on the floor dying.

2. Make healer's DPS more complex. We don't need to be DPS levels of complex, but we can have more to manage than a single button, a DOT, and MAYBE one button you hit on CD for a slight bump in DPS.

3. Consider maybe adding more unavoidable party-wide damage to the game that needs to be managed.

4. Consider adding mechanics that require healers to pay more attention. Perahps periodic debuffs that need to be healed through or dispelled that cannot be mitigated through other means. For shield healers, consider debuffs that will apply to the target if damage is done to health, but do not apply if damage is blocked by shields. There are a lot of ways to make healing more engaging without making stripping tanks of their agency.

4. give us hard mode versions of old dungeons that we can queue for for increased xp/rewards. These should slap the party around, forcing the healer to stay on their toes. Tank healing will help to ease the burden, but will not suffice on its own.

I make this post as someone who plays almost exclusively tanks/healers.

tank heals help in like... normal dungeons, yeah. but if you ever do any sort of extreme/savage (or even just eureka/bozja) you'll find out very quickly that it's a fart in the wind in comparison.

i don't think the problem is really the healer abilities (although an extra button or two for some attack or ability would be nice so it'd be less boring...) and i don't think the issue is the tank heals either.

the issue is that standard content is braindead. you can just brute force it. you don't need to think, you don't need to do much of anything. there are a lot (and i mean a lot) of healers who look at a lot of their CDs and think that most of them are useless simply because they can just smash two buttons on their keyboards and be ok 99% of the time. (see: foolish whms thinking bell or cure 3(which i know its a gcd) is useless)

what's lacking is an overall challenge for everyone which means healers are just left with not much to do. that's it.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

As to the designer - we know they have designers for various things. The game wouldn't exist if there were NO designers. They have 4 Job designers, and even if we assume they're all focused on DPS, there have been a lot of bad DPS Jobs, rotations, tuning, reworks, etc. While it's true that having designers should reduce the incidences of that, it doesn't guarantee it.

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In my own experience at least, designers are wildly inconsistent sources of content. Stick a designer on a project they are highly motivated for and their output will go through the roof. Hit them with a task that they can't stomach and you risk getting burnout instead of solid productivity.

Then you combine that with simply running the creative well dry over extended periods of time and IMO you end up in the situation FFXIV has found itself in now. Jobs are half baked, fresh ideas are scarce and there's just no faith in what they'll do next.

As I've mentioned elsewhere, IMO SE have 2 solid routes out of this hole, IMO they should either:

Do what worked for both themselves (and Blizzard) in the past and hire a few figures out of the community, they don't even have to be placed directly onto the job design team, just use them as a fresh new well for creative ideas to draw from and make use of the fresh enthusiasm they will bring to the team.

The second approach is to hire an experienced studio like Mythic in a consultancy manner and simply buy whiteboards full of concepts and ideas from them. No direct involvement, no handing over of the reigns, just simple boards full of ideas from which to draw from.

If it isn't immediately clear, the goal with both of these routes isn't to unleash a huge shakeup on the game's core design philosophy, but rather to replenish that same energy we saw in ARR to better allow the existing team to steer the ship out of these over homogenised waters and into something that is more diverse and enjoyable.

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Originally Posted by Grizzlpaw

1. Do not touch Tanks' self healing. Let tanks be self-sufficient to some degree. It does not feel good having to rely on your healer for the vast majority of your survivability as a tank. Dieing a death of a thousand paper cuts as your health is chipped away and you have no way to recover. Meanwhile your friendly glare mage is busy giving a dragon nasty looks as you lay on the floor dying.

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Tanks should be self-sufficient to a certain extend, but it shouldn't be as mindless as pressing a single button and then calling it a day.
Warrior and Dark Knight were self-sufficient as far back as Heavensward, but it took actual understanding of your job kit, how abilities interact with each other and proper execution to keep the self-healing rolling.

All Bloodwhetting requires you to do is pressing the button and then not falling asleep for the next 8 seconds, you could spam uncombod Mythril Tempest and get the same value out of it as someone playing the job well.

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

I think WAR should be the life-steal tank, but with the condition that it's tuned properly, and more importantly, you have to work for it (and doing that work being fun). Aside from that, I think maybe PLD is the only tank that should have any form of direct single-target or party heal/regen. I want jobs to fit their job fantasy.

I think the healers have enough healing options as they currently are. So I would rather they start building up their offensive options.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

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This.

I harp on this all the time, but I really feel Clemency and Vercure are good abilities BECAUSE they force people to consider if they need healing bad enough to abandon DPSing for it. It gives the ability to be a healer in a pinch (when you have a bad, dead, or DCed healer) but in a way that is very inefficient to use most of the time, so when you have a competent healer, you don't use it and they have gainful employment healing you and the party is more efficient than you healing yourself and dumping the healer. 1T/3DPS should not be more efficient than 1T/1H/2DPS. If it is, the Tanks/DPSers have too much healing relative to encounter damage.

This is why Bloodwhetting is bad (especially in AOE) but Clemency is good. The later requires the PLD to (mostly) abandon DPSing in order to be a healer.

The problem isn't Tanks having the ability to be self-sufficient to a degree. The problem is when they can be entirely self-sufficient without needing a healer AT ALL and also without sacrificing any DPS or mitigation/tanking ability to do so. WAR can, right now, be a Tank, DPS, and Healer all at once. PLD can be one or the other (DPS or Healer) but not both at the same time, same with RDM with Vercure.

If Bloodwhetting cut your damage by 50% to give you that healing, that MIGHT be different, as then it'd be something you use at need but that directly impacts your ability to do damage, so it would be a choice of "Do I really need this right now?" If Nascent cut your damage by 50%, only healed the target (not also you the WAR), and prevented generating Beast Gauge for its duration, it would still be there as a powerful tool in needed situations (healer DCed and you have the WAR and 1 DPS alive to finish the last 5-10% of the boss health before the Enrage) but not be overpowered as it is now.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

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Just to be clear, do we really mean to limit all self-sustain in that way? (And by sustain do you mean everything that sustains you --increases current or current and maximum eHP-- or solely healing / healing+barriers?)

If tanks didn't have any sustain (if the term isn't reduced to be redundant with healing), wouldn't that leave them just as high aggro DPS?

In the end, nullifying damage and recovering from damage are still both just sustain, and I feel like we'd unnecessarily narrow available job themes and differences to say, for example, that free %DR is okay but free healing (even if timing-sensitive) is inherently not, leading to get more homogenization.

Just ensuring decent parity in tank sustain and keeping total tank sustain in check relative to incoming damage across all serious content types and the excess wouldn't harm other roles' gameplay (so, no nonsense like Bloodwhetting scaling linearly with target count, even if its excess is limited to non-serious content, not the least because it makes WAR itself less skill-expressive) seems guidelines/stricture enough, and would avoid purposely homogenizing tanks further (as disallowing half of tanks' free sustain forms would do).


The problem with WAR right now, to me, is simply that it's OP, not that it self-heals (though Nascent Flash's means of external healing thematically makes zero sense and I'd therefore happily rehaul it). All means of equal total sustain in practice nonetheless equally reduce the amount of healing a given job requires, so it's not as if a balanced WAR steps on healers' toes any more than a balanced DRK.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Just to be clear, do we really mean to limit all self-sustain in that way? (And by sustain do you mean everything that sustains you --increases current or current and maximum eHP-- or solely healing / healing+barriers?)

If tanks didn't have any sustain (if the term isn't reduced to be redundant with healing), wouldn't that leave them just as high aggro DPS?

In the end, nullifying damage and recovering from damage are still both just sustain, and I feel like we'd unnecessarily narrow available job themes and differences to say, for example, that free %DR is okay but free healing (even if timing-sensitive) is inherently not, leading to get more homogenization.

Just ensuring decent parity in tank sustain and keeping total tank sustain in check relative to incoming damage across all serious content types and the excess wouldn't harm other roles' gameplay (so, no nonsense like Bloodwhetting scaling linearly with target count, even if its excess is limited to non-serious content, not the least because it makes WAR itself less skill-expressive) seems guidelines/stricture enough, and would avoid purposely homogenizing tanks further (as disallowing half of tanks' free sustain forms would do).


The problem with WAR right now, to me, is simply that it's OP, not that it self-heals (though Nascent Flash's means of external healing thematically makes zero sense and I'd therefore happily rehaul it). All means of equal total sustain in practice nonetheless equally reduce the amount of healing a given job requires, so it's not as if a balanced WAR steps on healers' toes any more than a balanced DRK.

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I would break it down:

You can have tools restricted by cooldowns that are not a loss, but the cooldowns need to be longer or have some additional resource cost attached to them. FFXIV does not dish out damage all that frequently, so something like Bloodwhetting having a cooldown of 25 seconds is insane because you might as well just have it up permanently for how it's available for literally every mechanic. Maybe you give it an MP cost. As pretty as the MP bar is on the UI, having it actually do something is more important than having a window decal.

You can also have tools that have some sort of opportunity cost, and they don't always have to be flat GCDs like Clemency. In fact, I kinda wish Clemency perhaps costed Oath Gauge, to give Oath Gauge more things to actually be used on. But when it comes at the cost of gauge, you have to ask about what the alternative is, and having those choices can be a good thing. Clemency specifically and other of Paladin's tools would need adjustments to make that work, but the point stands.

But I also think, rather than having all self-sustain be directly healing oneself, a tank like Warrior could instead replace some of that healing with buffs that increase healing received. Like if Equilibrium increased the amount of HP Warriors receive from all healing sources by 25%, then they could interact with that themselves through other actions, or give the healer a boost. That also synergizes nicely with Scholar which some might appreciate given the relationship they had during the Scholar quests, or perhaps they have ways of increasing the amount of HP they restore the lower their HP is. Pair that with an action that converts a major chunk of their HP into a barrier, and you have a really unique combo where the Warrior lowers their actual HP, gains a barrier for what they lose, and that in turn increases the healing they'd receive to get them back up.

I know we collectively recoil at the idea of self-harm mechanics, but the more Fontaine characters that come out in Genshin that play around with party HP, the more fun I feel that type of stuff can be. Furina came out recently, a character who can summon three pets to attack enemies with Hydro--water attacks. Each pet's attacks also drains the HP of one of your other four party members, and her burst grants the party a damage buff that's represented by a cheering crowd of water pets on your UI that continue to cheer for you louder and louder the more your party's HP increases and decreases. Pair that with someone like Wriothesley who's a fast-paced martial artist whose normal attack punches reduce his HP, but also grant him a buff that restores his HP when he uses a charged attack, and you have the UI audience going ballistic while in battle, and also gives your healer a ton of value in enabling you to go on like that endlessly without worrying about losing too much HP. It's such a fun combination.

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Originally Posted by Renathras

If Bloodwhetting cut your damage by 50% to give you that healing, that MIGHT be different, as then it'd be something you use at need but that directly impacts your ability to do damage, so it would be a choice of "Do I really need this right now?" If Nascent cut your damage by 50%, only healed the target (not also you the WAR), and prevented generating Beast Gauge for its duration, it would still be there as a powerful tool in needed situations (healer DCed and you have the WAR and 1 DPS alive to finish the last 5-10% of the boss health before the Enrage) but not be overpowered as it is now.

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This would be fine if they changed up the job's available mitigation. Right now Bloodwhetting is basically a mandatory defensive even if you don't necessarily need the healing, being forced to cut your damage by 50% to not die would just be bad design.
It's why I think Nascent Flash and Raw Intuition in Shadowbringers were the vastly better designed abilities.

You had to choose between either 20% mitigation or self-healing based on your actual dps output. Nascent would often be the superior choice if you knew what you were doing (beating out even the eHP provided by TBN) but you had to think about how much damage you were about to take and how much damage you would be able to deal yourself in the next 6 seconds.
Raw Intuition was always the safer choice since using Nascent could end with you outright dying or healing for so little that you just made your healers work more by using it.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I would break it down:

You can have tools restricted by cooldowns that are not a loss, but the cooldowns need to be longer or have some additional resource cost attached to them. FFXIV does not dish out damage all that frequently, so something like Bloodwhetting having a cooldown of 25 seconds is insane because you might as well just have it up permanently for how it's available for literally every mechanic. Maybe you give it an MP cost. As pretty as the MP bar is on the UI, having it actually do something is more important than having a window decal.

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This I could mostly agree with, though I would rather just have more damage taken (and perhaps even more defensive button-presses, given further intake increase accordingly) than give tanks even fewer tank button-presses per average minute.

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You can also have tools that have some sort of opportunity cost, and they don't always have to be flat GCDs like Clemency. In fact, I kinda wish Clemency perhaps costed Oath Gauge, to give Oath Gauge more things to actually be used on. But when it comes at the cost of gauge, you have to ask about what the alternative is, and having those choices can be a good thing. Clemency specifically and other of Paladin's tools would need adjustments to make that work, but the point stands.

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I wouldn't mind that, but the reason for Clemency not costing gauge is simple enough: it'd be redundant with Intervention, which heals for the same amount atop granting, what, 43% more eHP (for the first 4 seconds, less after).

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Like if Equilibrium increased the amount of HP Warriors receive from all healing sources by 25%, then they could interact with that themselves through other actions, or give the healer a boost.

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My issue with alleged "self-synergies" is that they so often get reduced to mere bundles (a la FoF-Goring-Req-Confiteor, all effectively a single button of 4 button-presses), at which point the extra button can often feel like mere bloat. Within limitations, that'd be fine, though.

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Pair that with an action that converts a major chunk of their HP into a barrier, and you have a really unique combo where the Warrior lowers their actual HP, gains a barrier for what they lose, and that in turn increases the healing they'd receive to get them back up.

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Sounds fine, even if a bit redundant with the benefit of TBN to avoid debuffs (albeit in a more [original] "shrug it off" flavor).

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I know we collectively recoil at the idea of self-harm mechanics,

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I feel like it's only the babysitters (healers with shit parties who feel like they're doing everything themselves) who actually recoil at self-harm mechanics (and even then, only outside of their job). For my part, I'm fine with them as long as they don't devolve into simply a maintenance loop (healers keeps Regen on you to make you slightly OP, without which you're slightly UP, etc.). So, in any other game, I'd be pretty optimistic about their results.

And I'd still like to see DRK play around with that (or would, if it weren't simply a less flexible version --with virtually no novel affordances-- relative to using MP for that, which leaves me instead at an impasse even if I think HP spending is thematically cooler).

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I would break it down: ...

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Agreed. Knocking it out of the park, my man. The Genshin part aside (not sure how well that would fit here, but...), the rest is spot on.

The problem with Bloodwhetting/Nascent is that the CD is so short, it can effectively be up all the time. It's not a situational ability like Clemency nor a long CD situational ability like Passage of Arms or even Shake It Off, and it incurs no penalty nor cost to use. If anything, NOT using it is penalizing yourself since it's free healing and free mitigation that is up so frequently you never really need to "hold" it in anticipation of anything.

I also don't think it's really fair comparing 1-2-3 heals (which are baked in over the course of a fight but won't save you themselves if things are going really bad since they're too small and too slow to do so) to things like Nascent or even Clemency.

[Self-harm mechanics are a bit more of a complicated thing since they have to be balanced carefully otherwise they don't work well. For example, if DRK was the only Tank that had to harm itself to do damage, the obvious result would be no one taking DRKs to parties anymore. Unless they did bonkers damage, in which case it would become a mandatory include. Neither of which are good... so then it would have to be ALL the Tanks that do it, and at that point, we're talking just another form of homogenization, not to mention it would alienate Tank players that don't like being edgy self harmers.]

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

You could have tank self-sustain exist, but come at a cost of personal DPS, like with Clemency. Tools to help you survive in a pinch, or when solo, but relying on your healer is more efficient when possible.

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That's basically how Stormblood tanks worked. They had heaps of survivability, I've soloed bosses on WAR back then too, but all of it came at the cost of a ~20% damage reduction, so relying on the healer was much more efficient in terms of party dps.

But a lot of tank mains seem unified in hating that they lose dps to survive and have to rely on the healer if they want to do damage, so I doubt SE would change it that way.

Side note: It's funny to me that tank mains are asking for healers to be busy healing and using Esuna on the rest of the party, but under no circumstances make the tank have to rely on the healer in any way.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it's pretty funny that a lot of things suggested by people to fix the healer role is something we already had in Stormblood but was removed in Shadowbringers.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

That's basically how Stormblood tanks worked. They had heaps of survivability, I've soloed bosses on WAR back then too, but all of it came at the cost of a ~20% damage reduction, so relying on the healer was much more efficient in terms of party dps.

But a lot of tank mains seem unified in hating that they lose dps to survive and have to rely on the healer if they want to do damage, so I doubt SE would change it that way.

Side note: It's funny to me that tank mains are asking for healers to be busy healing and using Esuna on the rest of the party, but under no circumstances make the tank have to rely on the healer in any way.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, it's pretty funny that a lot of things suggested by people to fix the healer role is something we already had in Stormblood but was removed in Shadowbringers.

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I can't think of any tank mains I've met for whom that was true, whereas I've encountered a couple dozen who feel like the change was for the worse.

I think the biggest problem was simply that self-sustain was tied to too many other things: it was your Enmity stance, and therefore had to be at even more significant dps cost for Enmity "management" to be a mechanic, and it was usually locked behind your max-eHP increasing "training wheels" stance.

Had it just been a simpler choice between damage and further self-sustain, and the latter could be less undertuned relative to the rDPS produced by just doing more tank damage directly --not to mention the costs of changing back into tank stance being crippling to short-term throughput for all but WAR-- then it probably would have been considered fine and vital to the role. Instead, it was a garbled mess until its end (and, again, still most tank mains I met thought removing it outright was the wrong choice).

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

I can't think of any tank mains I've met for whom that was true, whereas I've encountered a couple dozen who feel like the change was for the worse.

I think the biggest problem was simply that self-sustain was tied to too many other things: it was your Enmity stance, and therefore had to be at even more significant dps cost for Enmity "management" to be a mechanic, and it was usually locked behind your max-eHP increasing "training wheels" stance.

Had it just been a simpler choice between damage and further self-sustain, and the latter could be less undertuned relative to the rDPS produced by just doing more tank damage directly --not to mention the costs of changing back into tank stance being crippling to short-term throughput for all but WAR-- then it probably would have been considered fine and vital to the role. Instead, it was a garbled mess until its end (and, again, still most tank mains I met thought removing it outright was the wrong choice).

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There's been a few (assumed) tank mains that's popped up in discussions about healers saying that they don't want tanks to rely on healers at all but they're totally fine with everyone else needing to be healed more. Quite a few have suggested that the DPS should take more damage from DPS-targetted mechanics, but when the topic of tanks having to rely on healers comes up, quite a few have vehemently opposed it.

As for there being a simpler choice between damage and more self-sustain, the choice did exist back then. Remember that only WAR had sustain locked behind their tank stance (Inner Beast, Equilibrium), and that was fine because only WAR had a smooth swap between tank and dps stance. The other 2 had sustain that wasn't locked behind their tank stance, it just costed damage. PLD had Clemency that they can use at any time and it just costs a GCD (you could recoup the MP used by Clemency through Sheltron). DRK had Abyssal Drain and Souleater for sustain, neither of which required Grit up, so it really wasn't as convoluted as you mentioned.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

DRK had Abyssal Drain and Souleater for sustain, neither of which required Grit up, so it really wasn't as convoluted as you mentioned.

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Souleater (originally) didn't heal outside of Grit, and wasn't a choice regardless by StB (Delirium was removed and Power Slash was a waste outside of tank stance) and Abyssal Drain didn't heal without Dark Arts (DA, not Abyssal Drain, being the at-cost sustain but competing in AoE only with Dark Passenger, a 30s CD) --which stacked with AD's own cost to consume over a third(?, iirc?) of your MP-- while your SyS MP gen was roughly doubled in Grit.

So, Power Slash couldn't be an actual high-damage-alternative to the sustain of Souleater... because it was your Enmity option. Abyssal Drain couldn't be a sustain alternative to Unleash, because it was also your burstier MP spender and higher damage / non-Enmity option. ST sustain was a non-option, and AoE sustain had competing options only once per 30s. But to be able to use DA-AD often you needed either CDs... or Grit, since your SyS MP gen outside of tank stance barely over half of what it was inside tank stance.

...It was still, at the least, pretty muddled. Sustain options were held back by Enmity options which were quickly rendered defunct by the way tank stances synergized/worked with tank stance to make those actions basically useless outside of tank stance.

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There's been a few (assumed) tank mains that's popped up in discussions about healers saying that they don't want tanks to rely on healers at all but they're totally fine with everyone else needing to be healed more. Quite a few have suggested that the DPS should take more damage from DPS-targetted mechanics, but when the topic of tanks having to rely on healers comes up, quite a few have vehemently opposed it.

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The only "tank mains" I've seen "vehemently" opposed to any reductions to tank sustain or healing or those like MikoRemi who'd just be vehemently opposed to their favored job being less than overpowered; so, WAR mains / people who happen to OTP a tank, more relevantly. There's quite a large gap between wanting tanks still to have agency (which would only be aided by the ability to pull out additional sustain, even if at cost to dps) and being reluctant about even the slightest reduction to tank sustain or have that sustain reformulated (see the many WARs asking for Bloodwhetting/Nascent to return to the ShL version).

For my part, again, I like tanks hitting tank buttons and making tanking-related decisions. Stormblood at least left that as a prospect, even if it badly garbled all that by insisting on a DoA / irredeemably dull yet bloated implementation of Enmity (in place of anything that'd feel like actively thwarting the enemy's aggression against one's party). Accordingly, I like tanks having frequent-ish defensives instead of just a per-2-minutes trickle of actions or the like.

Here's a really wacky thought that just came to me, and I'm not necessarily promoting this idea, but it's a comparison that I had never made that's an interesting thought to consider:

Actions labeled as "spells" almost always come with an MP cost, unless they cost some other sort of resource like the lily heals. Well, in the Persona games, magic attacks cost that game's equivalent stat of "SP," but physical attacks cost a small percentage of the user's HP. For the sake of discussion, what if all weaponskills cost a percentage of the users HP to activate, something like 2-3% per weaponskill or something? For solo purposes, you could rework Second Wind into a GCD heal that has no cooldown, thus it costs the user DPS to use in a group setting, but is there to help physical DPS jobs maintain their HP when flying solo.

To address mechanics where the party's HP is reduced to 1... There's a character who consumes HP to use his skill in Honkai Star Rail where if he has less than the required amount, he can still use the skill and it will cost as much HP as he has, but leaves him at 1 HP, and it can be spammed at 1 HP without consuming any HP. You could set up weaponskills to work like that so it's not a disruption of your rotation.

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

Here's a really wacky thought that just came to me, and I'm not necessarily promoting this idea, but it's a comparison that I had never made that's an interesting thought to consider:

Actions labeled as "spells" almost always come with an MP cost, unless they cost some other sort of resource like the lily heals. Well, in the Persona games, magic attacks cost that game's equivalent stat of "SP," but physical attacks cost a small percentage of the user's HP. For the sake of discussion, what if all weaponskills cost a percentage of the users HP to activate, something like 2-3% per weaponskill or something? For solo purposes, you could rework Second Wind into a GCD heal that has no cooldown, thus it costs the user DPS to use in a group setting, but is there to help physical DPS jobs maintain their HP when flying solo.

To address mechanics where the party's HP is reduced to 1... There's a character who consumes HP to use his skill in Honkai Star Rail where if he has less than the required amount, he can still use the skill and it will cost as much HP as he has, but leaves him at 1 HP, and it can be spammed at 1 HP without consuming any HP. You could set up weaponskills to work like that so it's not a disruption of your rotation.

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

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I... can't say I'd be a fan. First, doing it everyone would make it feel that much less special on jobs that would otherwise have a unique thematic attachment to HP-spending. More than that, though, it just makes no damn sense; we're not psychic manifestations for whom our actions would spend how long we could last for, unlike if, say, Living Shadow were revised to have something of an old Blood of the Dragon mechanic. And above all... would anyone want to feel like there's a max battery power on their ability to do anything at all, let alone like they're literally punching their own fingers/hands/arms/stumps off as if out of incompetence?

I'm trying to imagine the XIV landscape with it, but... I'm pretty immediately repulsed, tbh, so it's hard to imagine fine details.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

It was still, at the least, pretty muddled. Sustain options were held back by Enmity options which were quickly rendered defunct by the way tank stances synergized/worked with tank stance to make those actions basically useless outside of tank stance.

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I think this is fair, tank stances back then didn't really offer a whole lot for the cost. It would be more interesting if tank stances actually enabled a wider array of defensives rather than just being an enmity toggle, they could also stand to be more unique among tanks, such as:

PLD - Iron Will: Raises your shield defensively. Increases the global cooldown by 0.5s and increases autoattack delay to 6s while increasing block chance, blocks now generate oath gauge.
WAR - Defiance: Channels your inner beast defensively. Increases max HP and incoming healing received while reducing crit rate. Beast gauge actions now restore a proportion of damage as health.
DRK - Grit: Channels the darkside defensively. Halts MP regen and uses MP to reduce damage taken. All weaponskills now regenerate MP.
GNB - Royal Guard: Channels aether inwards defensively. Reduces damage done by 15% while reducing damage taken by 15%.

Every tank would have a unique loss that hits them differently instead of a flat "reduces damage", every stance could change certain actions to have a defensive effect instead, like PLD's Blades combo could become a Shields combo that applies a shield or something like that. By limiting the defensives that tanks have outside of tank stance, they have the option to turn on tank stance if they need the defensives (this would assume that they designed tank stances to be a seamless toggle rather than a GCD like old Shield/Sword Oath). I think that the short CDs should be available outside of tank stance for more active mitigation gameplay while keeping the option of entering full defense available should one mess up their timing.

Changes like that would also circle around to helping healer gameplay as tanks trying to do optimal damage would actually require some amount of attention.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

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Honestly, when reading this, I just thought about the weird server tick thing where you can instantly kill a mob with 2 BLUs hitting Missile at the same time. There's the small chance that a player would hit a weaponskill at the same time as something setting their HP to 1, and depending on how the server reads that, the self-damage could come right after being set to 1 HP, which would kill them instantly. Funny stuff.

As for the idea itself, the intent seems to be to create healing busywork? I personally think it's not a good idea, it's vaguely reminiscent of the idea that everyone should do less damage as their HP falls, which encourages overhealing. This kind of change would probably cause newer healers to overheal a bunch.

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Originally Posted by Aravell

As for the idea itself, the intent seems to be to create healing busywork? I personally think it's not a good idea, it's vaguely reminiscent of the idea that everyone should do less damage as their HP falls, which encourages overhealing. This kind of change would probably cause newer healers to overheal a bunch.

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To be honest, I have no idea what "busywork" means. It's a word thrown around from time-to-time, but it's never consistent on what actually qualifies as busywork. Whether damage comes from the boss, another player, yourself, or anything else... damage is damage. If healing HP spent on actions is busywork, then isn't healing unavoidable damage also busywork?

Like I said, I'm not specifically advocating for that mechanic. It was just an idea I thought would be interesting to discuss, but as a criticism of the concept, I don't really understand this. I totally understand wanting damage to come from more interesting places as well, rather than just make a shock field on every battle arena that deals damage over time to all party members as another example. But having one does not mean the absence of the other. We could, in theory, have both.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

To be honest, I have no idea what "busywork" means. It's a word thrown around from time-to-time, but it's never consistent on what actually qualifies as busywork. Whether damage comes from the boss, another player, yourself, or anything else... damage is damage. If healing HP spent on actions is busywork, then isn't healing unavoidable damage also busywork?

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To me, hitting a button without any need for thought beyond, at most, "Will I need to move within the next second?" So, fillers the value of which could be easily replicated by auto-attacks / auto-casts delayed by use of any other weaponskill/spell, etc. If the amount of consideration would be unchanged even if its consequent button-presses per minute were removed, it's busywork.

In this case, having everyone's HP drain per action would provide no more thought than a negligible but constant DoT that further penalizes Speed. The resulting Regen casts it'd oblige wouldn't quite fit my way of defining busywork above, but would come damn close, so I can see why Aravell would have that complaint.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

To be honest, I have no idea what "busywork" means. It's a word thrown around from time-to-time, but it's never consistent on what actually qualifies as busywork. Whether damage comes from the boss, another player, yourself, or anything else... damage is damage. If healing HP spent on actions is busywork, then isn't healing unavoidable damage also busywork?

Like I said, I'm not specifically advocating for that mechanic. It was just an idea I thought would be interesting to discuss, but as a criticism of the concept, I don't really understand this. I totally understand wanting damage to come from more interesting places as well, rather than just make a shock field on every battle arena that deals damage over time to all party members as another example. But having one does not mean the absence of the other. We could, in theory, have both.

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I don't know what other people mean by the word, but to me "busywork" means extra work external to the fight itself. Like if you're playing an RPG and your party member just continuously consumes their own HP so you have to heal them or they die, I don't consider that healing requirements, I personally consider that external busywork. To me, continuous damage to the party external to boss mechanics (such as the lightning floor on Behemoth in LotA, the fire floor after Eternal Darkness in A11) doesn't exactly make healing any more interesting, it's similar to every raidwide being 60s apart and applying a 60s long bleed.

I'd personally want to see more pressure from the boss itself, the constant chip damage from Barbariccia was a good mechanic. I'd rather see high-speed healing mechanics rather than a slow burn, if that makes sense. It's just personal preference, I'm not dismissing the idea outright and saying that it's outright bad, I just wouldn't prefer it.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

It's just an idea that is interesting to think about. How would the landscape of FFXIV look if that were implemented?

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Given that a healer's GCD is 250p-330p (depending on which healer), and a DPS's is... more, usually (too many to list), I'd imagine the answer to that question is 'exactly the same as now, but the DPS bitch at the healer to have 100% Medica2 uptime to invalidate the HP draining effect of their weaponskills, thereby turning what was intended to be a DPS mechanic into an entirely Healer focused one'

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Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe

Given that a healer's GCD is 250p-330p (depending on which healer), and a DPS's is... more, usually

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Yes, but don't forget to multiply the healer's ppgcd per its trait modifiers (1.3x). If you're going to compare across roles (Tanks/Melee, Rangers, Casters/Healers), you'll need to do so in relative potency, not merely what's on the skill tooltips.

Dosis III spam, for instance, is a 429 relative ppgcd (+221 cppgcd). Eukresian Dosis is a relative 975p, Misery 1612p (yes, almost twice the relative potency of even a buffed Guren, a 2-minute SAM CD), etc.

Yes, I did forget to factor in Maim and Mend's effect. However, we also have to consider that Medica 2 is AOE, and therefore would be 'one GCD to save ALL of the DPS/Tanks from having to press their self-heal GCD', meaning we'd be comparing one Glare Dosis etc lost, vs... let's call it 5 (two tanks, two melee, one physranged) GCDs of varying potencies

Besides, let's be real, even if it were 'a gain' in RDPS for the DPS to manage their own HP (eg, the healer's GCD works out to be like 15% more RDPS contribution for that GCD compared to the amount the DPS are going to lose by all pressing their selfheal), the healer would STILL be the one to 'suck it up', because it's the healer's job to heal

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

To me, hitting a button without any need for thought beyond, at most, "Will I need to move within the next second?" So, fillers the value of which could be easily replicated by auto-attacks / auto-casts delayed by use of any other weaponskill/spell, etc. If the amount of consideration would be unchanged even if its consequent button-presses per minute were removed, it's busywork.

In this case, having everyone's HP drain per action would provide no more thought than a negligible but constant DoT that further penalizes Speed. The resulting Regen casts it'd oblige wouldn't quite fit my way of defining busywork above, but would come damn close, so I can see why Aravell would have that complaint.

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An old log showed a WHM cast their filler (Glare) almost the exact same times the PLD tank auto attacked.

So yeah, our filler is the definition of busy work.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Yes, but don't forget to multiply the healer's ppgcd per its trait modifiers (1.3x). If you're going to compare across roles (Tanks/Melee, Rangers, Casters/Healers), you'll need to do so in relative potency, not merely what's on the skill tooltips.

Dosis III spam, for instance, is a 429 relative ppgcd (+221 cppgcd). Eukresian Dosis is a relative 975p, Misery 1612p (yes, almost twice the relative potency of even a buffed Guren, a 2-minute SAM CD), etc.

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Those attacks are also modified by weapon damage. I'm pretty sure a 100 potency attack on a DPS is going to hit harder than a 100 potency attack on a healer

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

Those attacks are also modified by weapon damage. I'm pretty sure a 100 potency attack on a DPS is going to hit harder than a 100 potency attack on a healer

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Since the changes to magical vs. physical weapon scaling...

An unbuffed "potency" of damage on Tank/Melee is worth the least, because those roles have no permanent output increases.
A Ranger's attack potency is worth 20% more than a Tank's/Melee's potency, due to their Job Action Damage traits permanently increasing their damage by 20%. A Tank/Melee's potency is worth only 83.3% of a Ranger's potency.
A Healer's/Caster's potency is worth 30% more than a Tank's/Melee's potency, due to their Mend and Maim traits permanently increasing their output by 30%. A Tank/Melee's potency is worth only 76.9% of a Healer's/Caster's potency.

The "unbuffed" potency-value comparisons are as simple as comparing their permanent damage buffs.

The kicker is BLM, who gets 130% output from role traits, 123% output from Enochian, and 180% output on Fire spells during AF3, for a 275.4% or 287.8% modifier (the 340p Despair is actually worth 936.4 or 978.5 Tank/Melee potency), depending on whether Enochian and Maim and Mend are multiplicative.

For my part, I'd like to see the role bonuses, at least, replaced with just potency upgrades at those levels so Tank/Melee potency = Ranger potency = Caster/Healer potency, with any differences just coming from the damage/crit/dhit buffs we're under.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Since the changes to magical vs. physical weapon scaling...

An unbuffed "potency" of damage on Tank/Melee is worth the least, because those roles have no permanent output increases.
A Ranger's attack potency is worth 20% more than a Tank's/Melee's potency, due to their Job Action Damage traits permanently increasing their damage by 20%. A Tank/Melee's potency is worth only 83.3% of a Ranger's potency.
A Healer's/Caster's potency is worth 30% more than a Tank's/Melee's potency, due to their Mend and Maim traits permanently increasing their output by 30%. A Tank/Melee's potency is worth only 76.9% of a Healer's/Caster's potency.

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It's not just worth the least because tanks lack permanent damage increasing passives, they actually use a different formula for attack power calculations than dps jobs that is intentionally lower.

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

It's not just worth the least because tanks lack permanent damage increasing passives, they actually use a different formula for damage calculations than dps that is intentionally lower.

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The damage formulas are consistent across jobs.

This is the damage formula for physical direct damage (periodic damage adds a SKS/SPD multiplier in the second set, after tenacity), compliments of Ahk Morning, whether it be done by a Tank, Melee, or Ranger:

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{[[[Potency × f(Attack Power) × f(Determination)] /100] /1000} × {[f(Tenacity)/1000 × f(WeaponDamage) / 100] × Trait] /100} x {[[D2 × CRIT? /1000] × DH?] /100} x {rand[95,105] /100} × buff_1 × buff_2 x ....

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• (Like buffs stack multiplicatively.)
• DHit uses a value of 125 if direct hitting; else, 100.
• Crit uses a value of f(Crit) if critting; else, 1000.

This is the damage formula for magical direct damage, whether done by a Caster or Healer:

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{[[[Potency × f(Attack Power) × f(Determination)] /100] /1000} × {[f(Tenacity)/1000 × f(WeaponDamage) / 100] × Trait] /100} x {[[D2 × CRIT? /1000] × DH?] /100} x {rand[95,105] /100} × buff_1 × buff_2 x ....

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...They're the same.

The only differences occur within periodic damage/healing, because SkS and SpS both affect periodic affects but are two different stats, with physical jobs' abilities and weaponskills using the first and magical jobs' abilities and spells using the latter.

The dominant difference between two jobs' potencies across roles is just due to this part here:

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{[[[Potency × f(Attack Power) × f(Determination)] /100] /1000} × {[f(Tenacity)/1000 × f(WeaponDamage) / 100] × Trait] /100} x {[[D2 × CRIT? /1000] × DH?] /100} x {rand[95,105] /100} × buff_1 × buff_2 x ....

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I.e., when a job gets an extra 30% damage from its traits, it's going to deal a lot more, pre-buffs/conditionals, than a job that gets no bonus damage from its traits.

Other random/fun facts:

• Melee-ranged use a pre-weapon-delay-adjusted auto potency of 110, while Ranged autos do 100, but Dancer uses melee autos / Melee-ranged and Dancer use a pre-weapon-delay-adjusted auto potency of 110, while non-Dancer Ranged autos do 100.
• Jobs may vary by up to 5 output-affecting main stat from one another, due to initial flavoring of base stat spent on stats which have no effect for that job (like higher base DEX on SAM). In effect, this just means that SAM gets 3 less and MNK gets 5 less Power than other DPS, while PLD and GNB get 5 Power less than WAR and DRK, and NIN gets 5 less Power than BRD and MCH.

Edit: I got thrown off by the previous wording --"different formula for damage calculation"-- when I should have been thinking about the factors behind said formula. Tanks do indeed produce even less damage per potency than even Melee, due to a ~30% penalty to their Attack Power.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

The damage formulas are consistent across jobs.

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The damage formulas are, yes. It's the formula for f(AP) that is different for tanks, it's why I edited my post.
https://www.akhmorning.com/allagan-s...ower-fap--fmap

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Originally Posted by Absurdity

The damage formulas are, yes. It's the formula for f(AP) that is different for tanks, it's why I edited my post.
https://www.akhmorning.com/allagan-s...ower-fap--fmap

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Ahh, I get what you meant before then, yeah.

My bad for misunderstanding / being overly narrow then.

And now if only the devs bothered to mention in-game that there was a 30.3% damage debuff baked into Tank Mastery... >.>

So, to sum up, if I have this correctly, this would mean that a Tank does roughly 70% of its stated potency in terms of otherwise universal damage (or, "effective potency"), Melee 100%, Rangers 120%, and Casters/Healers 130%. ...Ugh.

Again, would much prefer they just standardized it all. I'm not sure why they felt the need to include so much hidden modification on the basis of levels or varying auto-attack potencies, etc., when they could have just used a softer degradation on secondary stat effects as level increases and just adjusted each job's stated potencies to be representative of their actual outputs (as per the change to pet action potencies).

I wouldn't even mind the varying damage modifiers if the game actually told you.
Especially in the case of Tank Mastery telling you that it increases your damage dealt when it in fact does nothing at best and the opposite at worst, I don't particularly like the game lying to me.

But that issue can be expanded to pretty all of your character info.
You're not told how much % increases your stats give you, you're not even told that there are stat intervals and that, for example, going from 1008 Tenacity to 1026 Tenacity does absolutely nothing because the next interval is at 1027.

Target of my target was an option from Warhammer Fantasy online where I could lock in my primary target for healing and stay locked on them then any time I cast a offensive spell it would hit the target of my target without me needing to tab back and forth. Yes I know there are ways to set up buttons to tab back and forth in FFXIV Im missing 3 fingers on one of my hands thanks to an IUD it would make life easier for folks like me without fully functional fingers. But I get I am a minority and not a streamer so they really dont care what I have to say.

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Originally Posted by SargeTheSeagull

Title. Would you rather...

1. Heal kits stay more of less as simple as they are but their damage kits/party buffs get put back to HW/SB levels of complexity/interaction (not copy/paste those expac's but roughly that many damage buttons/interactions). Stuff like a tiny AoE that buff's people's damage, SCH getting its dots back, AST cards going back to how they were in SB, Aero 3 coming back. etc

2. Damage kits stay as they are (30 sec dot, one button spam), but their healing abilities are made significantly more complex. No more "press one button to heal everyone to full". More unique interactions, passives, cooldowns etc. Stuff like a CD where everyone's HP in an area is averaged out, a debuff on the boss heals anyone when they attack the boss, AoE heals cost way more MP/are on a cooldown. etc.

And yes, a mix of 1 and 2 is absolutely allowed and frankly, that's my preference.

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The heal kits are already wildly over-engineered for what they have to cope with in game. First preference is more things baked into the fights to deal with, like more dispels and dots and heavier, more regular damage that actually stresses the existing heal kit and failing that a more complex DPS rotation. Any additional complexity added to heal kits would just be wasted because we already hardly have to use the existing kit.

Id rather neither, I would prefer they give healers buffing abilitys they have to maitane on players that only last 40seconds-60 seconds but between those 2 healer if I want to dps I will play a dps job and just healing means sitting around waiting for ppl to take damage, so Id prefer healers being given the vast majority of cds that they have to buff up the party with that way you have a constant

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Originally Posted by Jojoya

It shouldn't conflict. It is possible to design things to keep healers focused on healing without making it too difficult.

What SE needs to do is give up their "healer death equals wipe" mindset. I know this is a point of contention but I don't see resurrection as something that needs to be a healer specific duty. Give parties a way to resurrect healers when there is not a second healer or RDM/SMN in the party (like remove the "out of combat" restriction on Phoenix Down and let it stack to 5 or similar) and that mindset can be removed. Once the mindset is changed, it's easier to make it more interesting to heal even in normal difficulty content.

Otherwise, might as well remove healers all together if they're just going to give tanks and DPS healer tools because they don't think healers are capable of performing their roles without causing wipes.

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From the first page and sounded like a great idea
Alternatively... they could give all tanks and dps a new role action with a short or instance cast time, but also a very short cast distance and a long cooldown so everyone is always guaranteed to have an option available not tied to a resource they can run out of or forget to purchase.

Healing should be the top priority through better mechanics and reducing some tank self recovery. DPS self recovery is fine as is.

I would like to see a little more use of esuna. Especially debuffs which aren't critical but allow healers to improve DPS without DPS buttons.

Though, for low level dungeons and easier content there should be DPS skills that use healing resources to discourage use in higher level content. ED is a great example since it's not needed in higher level content but breaks up the monotony of 1 or 2 DPS actions.

That said, I can understand the concerns with ED since it can result in newer players over using aether and not being able to heal in a pinch so it makes sense these skills would unlock later on after new players have had an opportunity to learn the healer role (e.g., level 50).

Knowing that you can spend aetherflow on energy drain instead of over-capping is a good thing and helps with mp management on scholar. There is no benefit delaying learning it, all that will happen is people learning wrongly to save aetherflow instead of using it on cooldown.

More complex rotation.

All healers have 30 ish healing buttons already when for most content you need about five.